The nation that emerged from the Civil War was one in which slavery had finally been abolished, but racial and ethnic distinctions remained as the means through which American identity was negotiated and refined, especially as the population expanded further west, fulfilling the nation’s “Manifest Destiny” to achieve hemispheric hegemony. The persistence of, as well as the challenges to, Anglo-Saxon dominance in America on the eve of the twentieth century were exacerbated by concerns over racism, immigration, crime, and the city in a period that saw the United States dip a tentative toe into international waters in the form of a war with Spain. By this time, the generation that had fought the Civil War had reached political prominence. The experiences of their youth informed but certainly could not prepare them or the nation for the century to come, the so-called “American Century,” which really began after World War II with the economic and, arguably, cultural global dominance of the United States.
Yet over the course of the “American Century,” overshadowed as that was by the Cold War, and dominated, to a large extent, by the conflict in Vietnam, the idea of the American nation became nuanced. The national story of the civic nation with an ethnic core became one that emphasized the efforts of the excluded to challenge their exclusion. A renewed interest in America’s cultural diversity became the means through which to complicate any lingering complacency about the reality of the civic ideal in the United States. At the same time, it highlighted the ways in which, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, America’s founders had, as Abraham Lincoln argued, established an inclusionary premise through which all Americans, regardless of ancestry, could claim the nation “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.” In this context, too, the Atlantic world paradigm served not just to assuage international fears, but to stress the power of the civic ideal. It emphasized how permeable the nation’s borders were not just to immigrants but to international influences - if not international influence as such - and how susceptible it was to shifting understandings of colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism, sectionalism, warfare, identity, race, religion, gender, and ethnicity.
The imperative of making the civic ideal match or even approximate reality continues to confront America today, of course, and is a particularly problematic one in a nation of its geographic, demographic, and cultural complexity. Often more interested in how the democratic ideal has been exported, or imposed beyond the nation’s borders, popular analyses of the United States sometimes underestimate the historical struggle to achieve that ideal within the nation itself. If the New World “Colossus” has frequently found itself in the paradoxical position of “dictating democracy” or “extorting emancipation” abroad in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its own history, be that from the 1860s or the 1960s, reminds us that it has frequently been forced to deploy similar processes at home. Less a paradox than a pattern, the sometimes uneasy balancing act between civic and ethnic, positive and negative freedom is hardly an unfamiliar one in a nation that seems to want for others what it sometimes struggles to achieve for itself. The challenges it faced, the choices it made, the compromises it reached are ones that all nations must contemplate; increasingly so in a world in which communication is all but instantaneous, in which all borders can be breached, and in which the challenges posed by immigration, religious intolerance, and racial and ethnic divisions continue to compromise the stability of the modern nation-state.
Imagining America
Thus in the beginning all the world was America.
(John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1690)
America was a land, and later a nation, imagined before it was ever conceived. Although the dreams and ambitions of its first human settlers can only be surmised, whether crossing the Bering Straits on foot or arriving by sea, early migrants to the North American continent came in search of a better life. Whether their original intentions were settlement or possible trade routes, whether they sought a new home or simply new resources to take back home, the lure of a New World proved a potent one. With the exception of the peoples that Christopher Columbus identified, wrongly, as Indians, the earliest migratory endeavors produced few permanent settlements. The continent’s indigenous inhabitants were little troubled by the initially tentative forays of adventurous Vikings in the tenth and eleventh centuries, whose eventual settlements in Greenland were, although unwelcome, relatively short-lived, as quickly forgotten by the native tribes, perhaps, as they were by the world in general.
Absent external interference, therefore, the peoples that later comprised the many Native American ethno-linguistic and nationalist groupings of the modern period gradually developed what Jeremiah Curtin, a nineteenth-century folklorist, perceived as essentially primitive societies based on a combination of religious faith and consanguinity. As Curtin saw it:
The bonds which connect a nation with its gods, bonds of faith, and those which connect the individuals of that nation with one another, bonds of blood, are the
strongest known to primitive man, and are the only social bonds in prehistoric ages. This early stage was the one in which even the most advanced group of Indians in America found themselves when the continent was discovered.
(Jeremiah Curtin, Creation Myths of Primitive America, 1898)
Despite the fact that he might as easily have been describing the bonds produced, and as frequently severed, by the religious turmoil and monarchical machinations of fifteenth-century Europe as indigenous American cultures, Curtin’s views sound a discordant note today. Neither the idea of “primitive man” nor the notion that America was a continent just waiting to be “discovered” by Europeans forms part of the modern understanding of America’s past.
Prior to their encounters with European peoples, the indigenous societies of the Americas were, of course, both culturally and linguistically varied. Their actual population size remains a matter of debate, but was anywhere between 10 million and 75 million in total, of which 2 million to 10 million were within what is now the United States, at a time when the populations of Europe and Africa were 70 million and 50 million, respectively. Although there was a degree of interaction in the form of trade, travel, and - inevitably - warfare, the sheer size of the continent naturally encouraged the flourishing of a diverse range of settlements, cultures, and peoples. These ranged from the relatively stable but competitive agrarian political societies of the west coast, through the Hopewell peoples of what is now Ohio and Illinois, whose speciality was metalwork, to one of the most complex indigenous societies, that of the Cahokia who inhabited the Mississippi and Missouri floodplains. Nor were these static societies; like their European counterparts, they were subject to the forces of change, prompted by conflict and competition, by shifting agricultural patterns and expanding trading networks. Indeed, the parallels between indigenous American cultures and those European societies that eventually inserted themselves into their midst were perhaps more striking than their differences, both in terms of migratory patterns and, crucially, mythologies.
Native American creation myths take many forms, but in essence all tell a similar story; it is a story of origins and change, of metamorphoses, of human arrival in the world and of the transformations that made the human part of that world. Although absent the evocative trickster and anthropomorphic elements of their Native American counterparts, the European myth of American origins differs little from that indigenous pattern. The white European story of settlement, too, was ultimately one of grounding, of establishing not just a claim to the land, but an alignment with what was understood to be the spirit of that land. In the long term, that spirit would be accorded many titles - Liberty, Equality, Manifest Destiny - but for the earliest European settlers, simply making sense of the land itself, and of its aboriginal inhabitants, was the first step toward colonizing that land. This was the start of a process that would ultimately disinherit, if not entirely destroy, America’s indigenous societies. It established in their stead a colonial culture predicated on Old World values informed by European, predominantly British, legal, political, religious, and social precedents that would, over the course of the following few hundred years, not only achieve independence from the British crown, but emerge as the single most powerful nation on earth.